Might constraint be compatible with care? Home care as a situational ethics

Abstract

Respecting the autonomy and will of people has legitimately led to strictly control the use of constraint in care activities, and promote a care ethics centred around people's needs and wills. But constraint is underlying in any action aiming at making people do something, even with their consent, especially when their ability to evaluate what is best for them may be altered. Ceaselessly present in care, this ordinary, silent constraint should not be only deemed as a necessary evil to be prevented. In contrast with this legally-based view, the paper adopts a pragmatic perspective. Leaning on minute case studies carried out at disable people's homes, the empirical section takes up some key troubling moments between caregivers and patients as trials capable of revealing 'constraint in practice': a situation of uncertainty, doubt, hesitations on the appraisal of what is happening and how to deal with it, banning any clear-cut distinction between technical gestures and moral values. Having outlined the characters of such a 'situational ethics', the authors argue in conclusion that, provided caregivers are never quits with its use, constraint is compatible with care, and assume that care theories could fruitfully support this advocacy to 'maintaining the trouble' in care practices.

Patients’ autonomy as a negotiated order: an ethnographic perspective on the clinical management of childhood obesity

“…Several authors in the field of health and social sciences have analysed the rise of the principle of patients' autonomy in healthcare (Armstrong 2014, Finkelstein and Marcus 2018, Heaton et al 2016, Hennion and Vidal-Naquet 2017, M enoret 2015, Mol et al 2010. According to Armstrong (2014), the idea that patients are capable of individual autonomous action emerged during the second half of the 20th century in medical literature (Armstrong 2014: 163).…”

From Valuation to Instauration: On the Double Pluralism of Values

“…But as I said, I will not borrow questions, concepts and arguments from the sociology of valuation and apply them to music or wine (Hennion 2015a), or care (Hennion and Vidal-Naquet 2017) or other forms of attachment. My point is to insist on the resistance of things.…”

“…What attaches us, and what we are attached to is everything but an abstract, dualist, a priori or arbitrary choice made by a free subject. The word is a breaker of dualisms: first between objectivity and the social (Latour 2005;Daston and Galison 2007), but also between the passive and active modes (Gomart and Hennion 1999;Hennion 2017). To hold to something is a relationship which is fundamentally reciprocal.…”

Estranged relations: coercion and care in narratives of supported decision-making in mental healthcare

“…Woods, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton and S. Richards. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 596–610; Antoine Hennion and Pierre A Vidal-Naquet (2017), “Might Constraint Be Compatible with Care? Home Care as a Situational Ethics,” Sociology of Health & Illness 39, no.…”

“…58. Antoine Hennion and Pierre A Vidal-Naquet, 2017, “Might Constraint Be Compatible with Care?”; Mol, The Logic of Care ; Mol et al, Care in Practice .…”